Forecasting unemployment with Google Trends: age, gender and digital divide

This paper uses time series of job search queries from Google Trends to predict the unemployment in Spain. Within this framework, we study the effect of the so-called digital divide, by age and gender, from the predictions obtained with the Google Trends tool. Regarding males, our results evidence a...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Mulero, Rodrigo, García Hiernaux, Alfredo Alejandro
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2022
País:España
Institución:Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)
Repositorio:Docta Complutense
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:docta.ucm.es:20.500.14352/72990
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/72990
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Digital divide
Forecasting
Gender
Google Trends
Unemployment
Economía
53 Ciencias Económicas
Descripción
Sumario:This paper uses time series of job search queries from Google Trends to predict the unemployment in Spain. Within this framework, we study the effect of the so-called digital divide, by age and gender, from the predictions obtained with the Google Trends tool. Regarding males, our results evidence a digital divide effect in favor of the youngest unemployed. Conversely, the forecasts obtained for female and total unemployment clearly reject such effect. More interestingly, Google Trends queries turn out to be much better predictors for female than male unemployment, being this result robust to age groups. Additionally, the number of good predictors identified from the job search queries is also higher for women, suggesting that they are more likely to expand their job search through different queries.